'Alan touched the lump on his neck. He was getting the hang of this metaphor' ... illustration by Matt Blease. Click to enlarge

Alan Clay arrived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He added the Saudi Arabia because otherwise Americans might not know where he was. He had taken two planes to get there. In Nairobi, Kenya, he had met a woman he would probably have gone to bed with if he had stayed. But he didn't, so he didn't.

He tried to sleep but he couldn't. Even reading his own sensitively pared-down sentences didn't help. Put simply, he was a complete failure. He was 54 years old, divorced and broke. He couldn't even afford the tuition fees for his daughter, Kit, who was at college in Boston, USA. He started writing Kit a letter. "Dear Kit, here is another letter I am unlikely to send."

This was his last chance. An opportunity to make a six-figure commission selling an IT system to the King Abdullah Economic City in the desert. Luckily, he did not stop to wonder why an American IT giant would have employed a complete idiot to sell its most expensive hardware. So the reader did not have to, either.

It was nine o'clock when Alan eventually woke up. "Oh dear," he said to himself. "I've missed the bus out to KAEC and I am going to be late for the king. That's not very good, is it?" He phoned down to reception for a cab.

"Hello," said Yousef. "I'm your driver. Though I'm not really a driver. Tell me a joke."

Alan touched the lump on the back of his neck. He was sure it was cancer. Fingers crossed, it was. The heat was oppressive when he arrived at his tent in the desert. "I'm sorry I'm late," he said. "Don't worry," Karim would have replied if he had bothered to turn up. "The King isn't coming today. Or any day soon for that matter."

Alan touched his lump again and thought he was beginning to get the hang of this metaphor.

"Hello," said a woman called Hanne from Amsterdam, Holland. "Seeing as you are going to spend the next 100 pages making pointless trips into the desert, why don't you have a drink and have sex with me?"

He fumbled a bit but his cock was as limp as the subtext. "Never mind," Hanne said brusquely. "Let me take you to the doctor to have your lump looked at."

"It's definitely a benign cyst," said the sultry Dr Hakem, much to everyone's dispappointment. "But I can take it out for you."

Alan found himself with a lot of spare time on his hands, even after writing dozens more letters to Kit that he would never send. So when Yousef offered to take him out into the desert to go wolf-shooting, he eagerly accepted after making a bad joke about being in the CIA. "That's not funny, either," said Yousef.

Alan knew he was going to kill the wolf. But he fired at a shepherd boy by mistake. "Whoops," he said. "It's OK," Yousef said. "Luckily you missed. You'd better go back to Jeddah."

"I've taken out your cyst," Dr Hakem purred. "Now I want to sleep with you."

"All right," Alan said, completely unaware of how improbable it was that every attractive younger woman in the book should find him irresistible.

It was still very hot when he went back out to KAEC a fortnight later. "I'm glad you've arrived," said Karim, who had by now bothered to turn up, "because the King is finally here."

"Do you think he will like my presentation?"

"Yes, but I wouldn't count on him sleeping with you as well. Or on him buying your system, as he now wants to do business with China."

"That's symbolism for you, I suppose," Alan shrugged. He was still 54, broke and a loser. "Do you think it would be OK to stay on out here a while?"